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AUTHOR
A Di Maio
Prefazione al romanzo di Jumoke Verissimo, Memoria e desiderio
A well established and renowned poet residing in Canada, Jumoke Verissimo debuted with her first novel, A Small Silence, in 2019. The Preface to the Italian edition elucidates how in Verissimo's fictional account of a dissident intellectual released from prison after the end of Abacha's dictatorship, and in his friendship with a young woman studying at the local University, we find a portrait of today's Nigeria trying to survive its post-independence, post-colonial, post-dictatorship era.
Bridge over Troubled Water: Italy and the Black Mediterranean
Since ancient times, Italy has served as a bridge between Africa and Europe, facilitating exchanges of goods, crops, legends, human beings, and deities. In recent decades, this role has come back to everyone’s attention because of the flows that have turned the Mediterranean into one of the main crossroads on the global migratory chessboard. Several young Africans have embarked the Mediterranean Passage. Some have arrived to the opposite shore, whereas some have not. The survivors have reshaped the history of the African Diaspora. The history of the Black Mediterranean resonates with that of the Black Atlantic. Moreover, the considerable presence of an African Italian community inevitably l…
La fiaba del Mediterraneo Nero: Quando il cielo vuole spuntano le stelle di E.C. Osondu
Pubblicato in prima mondiale in italiano nel 2020, Quando il cielo vuole spuntano le stelle del nigeriano E.C. Osondu racconta, attraverso lo sguardo e la voce di un giovane africano di un paese non meglio identificato, uno dei fenomeni più significativi della nostra storia contemporanea, l’odissea di chi sfida il Mediterraneo per raggiungere l’Europa. Il protagonista di questo classico romanzo di formazione dai toni fiabeschi sogna di arrivare a Roma, città sacra nota per la sua bellezza. Per raggiungerla, il giovane attraverserà il deserto e il mare, incontrando un’umanità in movimento, con cui condividerà storie, esperienze, aspirazioni. Il viaggio è rito di passaggio intimo ma anche con…
Prefazione a Sulaiman Addonia, Il silenzio è la mia lingua madre
Sulaiman Addonia's 2018 novel Silence is My Mother Tongue, uncharacteristically set in a refugee camp, follows the sentimental education of a girl, Saba, in the place that she, her brother, and their friends have learnt to call home. The Preface to the Italian edition remarks how this classic and yet extraordinary coming-of-age novel offers a fundamental counter-narrative to the mainstream representations of life stories of minor refugees all over the world.
The Black Mediterranean: A View from Sicily
While Italy has recently experienced nationalist drives, Sicily and in particular the City of Palermo, one of the major ports of refuge for countless migrants arriving in Europe from the African shores, has distinguished itself as an experimental site where to rethink and challenge notions of residence, mobility, citizenship and belonging. Through a series of cultural initiatives, Palermo has become a hub for frontline artists, writers, intellectuals, and activists who have gathered to explore the historically and contemporary ways in which black voices have been silenced and black bodies have been ambiguously imagined in Western-dominated global culture. Investigating these questions is fu…
Gordimer's Short Novel The Late Bourgeois World. Elisabeth, a Woman in the Interregnum
Focusing on a close-reading of Nobel laureate Nadine Gordimer's short novel The Late Bourgeois World, the essay investigates the history of Apartheid South African society and its racial tensions in one of its most critical moments. Gordimer's fiction and non-fiction frame the study, as well as an array of references to the major critical texts regarding the author.
Postcolonial Intersections: Transnational Women Voices from Minor Italy
The rising corpus of Italian postcolonial literature, mainly by women writers originally from the Horn of Africa, is urging Italian letters to engage with other contemporary transnational productions, thus challenging the notion of national canons and vertical power relations, in favor of a writing seeking for horizontal, minor connections unmediated by the center, as suggested by Francoise Lionnet and Shu-mei Shih, whose work on Minor Transnationalism draws from Deleuze & Guattari and Edouard Glissant. As a case of point, the article offers a reflection on Ubax Cristina Ali Farah's narratives and their use of language.
Migrazioni/Migrations
Questo libro è parola e immagine. È un ponte tra due continenti uniti per secoli dalle rotte commerciali che solcano il Mediterraneo, il mare che un tempo consentiva lo scambio di merci e idee, oggi attraversato da un’umanità in fuga che dall’Africa avanza inesorabile verso l’Europa. Sviluppando un'idea del grande artista nigeriano Wole Soyinka, primo premio Nobel africano per la letteratura, Alessandra DI Maio, sua traduttrice e collaboratrice di lunga data, ha chiamato a raccolta 32 poeti (16 italiani e 16 nigeriani), invitandoli a versificare sul tema della migrazione. Sedici poesie, in omaggio a quella che per gli Yoruba, la nobile stirpe da cui Soyinka discende, è una cifra religiosa, …